The IEEE 802.11ad standard has been proposed to support high definition (HD) multimedia and wireless docking station applications. Developments further to this standard have been proposed, including increasing the number of devices supported and supporting multiple device-to-device (D2D) communication links.
There is interest in supporting D2D traffic with heterogeneous quality of service (QoS) requirements, such as HD Video/Mass-Data Distribution, within the coverage of one primary connection point (PCP) or access point (AP). In particular, multiple users could have direct communication links between their devices, and these D2D links could have various QoS requirements, such as in terms of delay and throughput. Moreover, these D2D links could be from one device to multiple devices simultaneously. As a result, large amounts of traffic between user devices could coexist and may consume significant portion of the bandwidth.
Beamforming (BF) is the mechanism used for transceiver pairs to establish a communication link for communication. However, establishing multiple D2D communication links may pose challenges to the BF protocol design, particularly for wireless local area networks (WLAN) operating in 60 GHz millimeter waveband (mmWave) under directional multi-gigabit (DMG) mode. BF complexity increases linearly with the increase in number of antenna array of transmitters and receivers. Further, BF complexity increases with the increase of the number of devices and communication links. D2D communication links grow exponentially as of the number of devices in a network increases, leading to exponential growth rate of the BF complexity.